Dozens Killed in Orlando Shooting, Tusk Warns of End of Western Political Civ if UK Leaves EU, Pittsburgh Wins Stanley Cup: A.M. Links

About 50 people were killed by a gunman who opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando for which ISIS took responsibility. President Obama delivered remark about the massacre, saying it was a "reminder" of how easy it is for Americans to purchase weapons. Donald Trump tweeted that he didn't want congratulations for "being right about radical Islam" but "toughness" and "vigilance," and called on Obama to resign.

The United States will likely not make a decision on U.S. troops in Afghanistan before the NATO summit in Warsaw.

The Iraqi army says it has secured a safe passage for residents of Falluja to flee through.

European Council President Donald Tusk said that if Britain votes to leave the European Union it could spell the end of th EU and Western political civilization.

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Apparently it has to do with masculinity. I just read a blog post (to which I refuse to link) which argued it was all about the societal messages to men that they must be masculine, that being gay is not masculine, so we give men guns (enabled by Congress which is mostly white men) and, lo and behold, they have almost no choice as men but to shoot up an LGBT nightclub.

But, he’s a prog, so he’s smarter than everyone else so this analysis must be true.

Allah is simply the Arabic word for “God,” specifically the god of Abraham who is worshipped by Christians, Muslims and Jews. Arab Christians, of whom there are many, use the term “Allah” when referencing Abraham’s god.

Tonio: yeah, I know. I should have been clearer. The entire purpose of the blog post I referenced was to generic-icize the incident. There was no mention of Islam, ISIS, etc. The point was to make the shooting about religious males proving their masculinity by killing gay people.

The gunman…was a follower of a controversial gang leader-turned-bank robber who was released from prison last year despite warnings from prosecutors that he would recruit people to carry out violent acts…

…Omar Mateen was a radical Muslim who followed Marcus Dwayne Robertson, a former U.S. Marine known to his supporters at his Orlando-based Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary as “Abu Taubah.” a law enforcement source said.

“It is no coincidence that this happened in Orlando,” said a law enforcement source familiar with Robertson’s history of recruiting terrorists and inciting violence. “Mateen was enrolled in [Robertson’s online] Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary.”

The gunman was at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce with Imam Shafiq Rahman two days before the nightclub attack, according to The Washington Post. That mosque was frequented by American-born suicide bomber Monar abu Salha, who blew himself up in Syria in 2014, and the two knew each other, according to officials.

I’m curious whether the rumors are accurate that Mateen went overseas in the last few years for terrorist training.

Oh, that’s interesting. Three possibilities, none good for the FBI (etc): FBI was aware of all this and was trying to setup a sting but didn’t spring the trap soon enough. FBI was aware of all this, but didn’t think it was a credible threat. FBI was too busy going after counterfeit purses and shoes.

There is also a fourth possibility: FBI knew about this guy, but just didn’t have the evidence necessary to charge or convict him of something. And I think this is the most likely.

As civil libertarians, we need to grapple with this. Every day there are thousands of people expressing sympathy for ISIS. They are not breaking the law, and have the right to express such despicable thoughts. The FBI should of course investigate those people, but at the end of the day, they don’t know which of those thousands of people are going to actually take a gun to a night club.

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve already heard people asking about whether or not this guy was on the No Fly list, and whether or not they could have been prevented from buying a gun. As bad as it may be, we need to be willing to give the FBI a pass on this guy if in fact the worst they could find was that he had bad views and happened to know some other people who did bad stuff. The alternative is that we give the government the ability to persecute anyone who isn’t thinking “appropriately”.

Yes, this is an important point to make. I don’t want the FBI or anyone else to be in a position to find every terrorist and nasty person in the country. That would require massive surveillance, and even if it were tightly focused now, the apparatus would be in place for the next target. And it’s also not that hard to plan some horrible attack without doing anything illegal that would give the FBI reason to arrest you. It’s easy to rip on teh FBI after something bad happens, but I think you just have to accept that in a free-ish society, you just can’t stop every bad thing without losing a lot of freedom, privacy and due process.

Well, he said he was, and they said he was. Do you need more than that?

Well, yes. Anyone can say “I did this for ISIS” and an ISIS spokesman can claim responsibility for anything. I’m not sure why anyone would take these assholes at their word. It may well be that ISIS in some way directed this, but it seems at least as likely that it was “inspired by ISIS” and the guy acted alone.

I’m not clear why anybody would refuse to take these assholes at their word, myself.

Because terrorists and their ilk often claim responsibility for attacks they didn’t actually have anything to do with. I’m pretty sure that is a well known thing that happens. They are evil nasty people trying to appear as big and scary to the world as possible. It’s not surprising in the least that they would claim responsibility for attacks they didn’t actually plan or support. So I see no reason to assume that their claim of responsibility means anything other than that they approve.

I’m not saying it wasn’t an Islam based/inspired attack. Obviously it was. What I don’t assume is that he was in any way directed by an organized terrorist group. The guys who beheaded that soldier in London probably weren’t taking direction from someone in Syria or whatever either. That doesn’t mean no one knows why he did it. He told everyone why he did it.

You are completely missing the point of what I said. How do you read what I wrote as questioning whether it was a terrorist act? Is reading really that hard? I didn’t say it wasn’t terrorism and I didn’t say it wasn’t connected to Islam. It clearly was both of those things. All I’m saying is that it seems somewhat likely at this point that he planned and committed the attack on his own and wasn’t specifically directed by ISIS and that you shouldn’t assume that it was directed or coordinated by anyone other than the guy who shot all those people.

This is what Azathoth!! does on every thread even remotely related to things like this. He waits until it peters out to only a few comments an hour and spews a bunch of shit, usually composed almost entirely of “Muslims BAD!”

A 230-foot long replica of Noah’s Ark collided with a Norwegian Coast Guard vessel as it arrived in Oslo, Norway on Friday, causing damage to both ships.

Media says the wooden replica, built by a Dutch carpenter Johan Huibers after he dreamed of a flood in his home town, was being towed into Oslo harbor when it somehow lost control and crashed into the moored patrol vessel Nornen.

You know I might be interested in reading the script of Hamilton but the “music” done in hip-hop fashion is practically unintelligible. I actually can’t understand half of what is being “sung.” No, I don’t need a hearing aid.

Real talk: I’m exhausted with the idea that fat Black bitches have to take care of everybody. Like, full stop.

I’m tired of everyone expecting something from me. Whether it’s using me as inspiration porn, using me as dissuasion porn (read: someone to never look like or love/like/fuck), to people eating off my flesh for their own resilience, support or power: fuck you, pay me.

Setting aside all of her victimology and entitlement, which I’m sure earned her an A in Africana Studies, she can’t even string together a coherent argument. Among her litany of complaints are people using her for “dissuasion porn” and “eating off of [her]” or even some how dare to “yassss” her.

You can’t invent this kind of stupid, it grows organically in the mind of simpleton with a superiority complex and is then cultivated and enabled by the social justice movement and proggy culture.

A court in Qatar has convicted a Dutch woman of having sex outside marriage after she told police she was raped. The 22-year-old was handed a suspended sentence and fined $824 (?580). She will also be deported. Her lawyer said her drink had been spiked at a Doha hotel in March and she had woken up in a stranger’s flat, where she realised she had been raped. Her alleged attacker, who said the sex was consensual, was sentenced to 100 lashes for having sex outside marriage. He will be given a further 40 lashes for consuming alcohol. The woman has been detained since making the allegation three months ago, but her case only came to light over the weekend when her family decided to go public.

Having actually been a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia, albeit of the Western expat variety, I find this criticism to be specious. On government infrastructure projects under contract with a global engineering & construction concern or major joint-venture projects with international partners, the safety standards are comparable with anywhere else in the world. I worked on three $1B+ projects, and our safety statistics were as good or better than the US average on every one. That includes the safety performance of local and regional contractors under our management. I’m sure that much of the World Cup infrastructure work in Qatar is not going to be directed by a global E&C firm. Even so, their safety standards will probably be an order of magnitude better than they were in the US back when, say, the Hoover Dam was built.

That is not to say that everything is going to be swell for migrant workers in Qatar. They work long hours in unpleasant conditions and live in cramped conditions. The food isn’t great, but is not bad and it is abundant. Their work contracts make it difficult to quit since they are on the hook for transportation costs back home if they don’t complete the term of their contract. And, sure, there is probably some royal jerk who is using his political connections to get visas and work permits to exploit their willingness to work for low wages. But nobody puts a gun to their head to force them to work in Qatar, and they are banking what is, to them, the big bucks for their family back home. I knew quite a few who accumulating capital to start up a business back home after several years.

The wage and living conditions argument is similar to the sweatshop criticism of Adidas or Apple. The safety argument is probably even more specious.

The Middle East is one messed up society, and Qatar is a really, really stupid selection for the World Cup. The safety and working conditions surrounding the construction of facilities in Qatar should be pretty low in the list of reasons why.

I imagine that this will fall on extremely deaf ears. There’s no doubt that there are aspects of the culture in that region which are absolutely terrible. There’s also no doubt that some projects will be utterly detestable. But when large Western-based contractors are involved in large projects, it’s generally done on the up-and-up, if for no other reason that they’d be the first to be hammered if shit started going sideways.

“”””Why is it so dangerous? Because no one can foresee what the long-term consequences would be,” Tusk said. “As a historian I fear that Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also of western political civilization in its entirety.””””

Following the lead of establishments in London and Melbourne, “The Amrita” — Sanskrit for ‘immortality’ — also has strict age restrictions, with only patrons between 18 and 60 allowed in, after they check in their clothes and put on paper underwear provided by the restaurant.

“If you are more than 15 kilograms (33 pounds) above the average weight for your height, we ask you refrain from making a reservation,” a list of rules posted on the restaurant’s website states, explaining that patrons could be weighed if they do not appear to be within the correct weight range.

Guests found to be “overweight” will be refused entry to the restaurant, which opens on July 29, and will not be entitled to a refund, its website points out. All payments must be made in advance on an online booking page.

The list of rules asks visitors not to “cause a nuisance to other guests” by touching or talking to fellow diners. Tattooed customers are barred from entry.

This is also the same rationale that plagues the Native American indigenous peoples of North America… Essentially, consuming a diet, that, from an evolutionary POV, being sequestered and a small, discrete population, were/are not prepared to tolerate well.

The U.S. government gives refugees on public assistance special “loans” of up to $15,000 to start a business but fails to keep track of defaults that could translate into huge losses for American taxpayers, records obtained by Judicial Watch reveal. The cash is distributed through a program called Microenterprise Development run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Since 2010 the program has granted thousands of loans to refugees that lack the financial resources, credit history or personal assets to qualify for business loans from commercial banks. Most if not all the recipients already get assistance or subsidies from the government, according to the qualification guidelines set by the Microenterprise Development Program. It’s a risky operation that blindly gives public funds to poor foreign nationals with no roots in the U.S. and there’s no follow up to assure the cash is paid back. The idea behind it is to “equip refugees with the skills they need to become successful entrepreneurs” by helping them expand or maintain their own business and become financially independent.

The whole refugee program is a welfare program from top to bottom. And a jobs program for those who administer it, including the so-called charities who get paid for every refugee they help sign up for welfare.

This report can’t possibly be true. The enlightened crowd around here assured me that refugees weren’t even given the cost of resettling in America. Surely they can’t be being given “loans” to start businesses!

An amendment to the defense bill that would preserve the U.S. refugee program for endangered Afghan military interpreters was blocked from a vote in the Senate late last week, prompting outrage from advocacy groups and military veterans.

The amendment to the defense authorization bill would authorize the State Department to issue up to 4,000 additional U.S. visas through the Special Immigrant Visa program. The program is designed to provide visas to Afghans who worked with the United States in Afghanistan and are now under threat from the Taliban.

The State Department has said it is on track to run out of its current allotment of visas, potentially stranding thousands of Afghan interpreters and their families who are still on the waiting list.

Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen’s father is an Afghan immigrant who hosted an anti-American TV show and once called the Taliban “our warrior brothers.”

Seddique Mateen appears in scores of online videos, including one he posted to Facebook right around the time of his son’s rampage. In it, he wears combat fatigues and salutes the camera.

In a video posted last year on YouTube, Seddique Mateen declared his candidacy for the Afghan presidency ? despite the fact that the election took place a year earlier, according to the Washington Post.

Dozens of YouTube videos show him hosting the “Durand Jirga Show” on a TV channel broadcast from California. The name of the show refers to the “Durand Line,” the long-disputed border that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The show is known for “its anti-US tirades” and “pro-Taliban” remarks, a former Afghan official told the Associated Press.

In one video, Mateen denounces the Pakistani government and speaks favorably about the Taliban, the Washington Post said.

“Our brothers in Waziristan, our warrior brothers in [the] Taliban movement and national Afghan Taliban are rising up,” he says.

Of course, this may just be par for the course for Central Asian failed politicians.

Subtlety is for weak mammals who desire to live forever…Your Future Reptilian Overlords employ loudeners on all their weaponry to instill terror in the hearts of mammals….that and our 40 watt plasma rifles normally sound pretty nerdy out of the box

You would need technical knowledge to do something like that. But with 9/11, these bastards proved that they can get just enough technical knowledge to do the job, like steering planes after take off to crash them into buildings. (Screw lessons on landing a plane.)

G4S is, IIRC, the largest security firm in the world. While true they supply personnel to guard nuclear power plants and other sensitive sites, they also supply rent-a-cops to lots of other places. The fact he had a FL armed security officer firearms license doesn’t imply that he’d have been assigned to guard something like a nuke plant, especially after two or three separate FBI interviews about things like him claiming to be a terrorist, and knowing a US-born suicide bomber who went off to Syria to blow himself up.

Then again, it’s the Obama Administration: is there anything they can’t fuck up?

Roughly the time between 1940 – when they said that supporteres of foreign totalitarianism (i. e. commies) couldn’t serve on their board – to that time in the 1970s when they said, OK, commies *can* serve on our board, and what’s more, we will make a grovelling apology for excluding them previously.

Yes, because Islamists always follow what Christians have to say on anything. It has nothing to do with the hatred of gays contained in the Koran. That is so stupid it seems as if ACLU must have been hacked or something.

Say what you will about Christianity, and as an atheist I often do, but it’s provides a decent bulwark against the expansionist inclinations of Islam that atheist social philosophy and associated politicians seem unprepared to provide.

A bit hyper since Britain never was really deep into the EU as were the the founding members choosing to have one foor in and one foot out so to speak. Moreover, recall de Gaulle didn’t even want the UK in the original group.

Nonetheless, the overall point stands. Other factors could arguably bring the whole thing down; including a technocratic system.

With growth looking shaky, worries that the “Brexit” vote could tip Europe back into recession have moved to the head of a list of concerns for investors which includes banks’ problems with negative interest rates and dangerous imbalances in China.

A poll late on Friday gave Britain’s “Leave” camp a 10-point lead, knocking sterling back by almost 3 full cents against the dollar and driving the worst losses for Asian stock markets in four months. European shares .FTEU3 fell 1.5 percent and Wall Street was set to open 0.3 percent lower.

Other polls have been tighter, but money markets have now abandoned expectations, high just weeks ago, that the U.S. Federal Reserve could raise official borrowing costs on Wednesday, just 8 days before the UK vote. Instead, the worry is that the Fed could use language that quells expectations of a move this year at all.

*standing ovation* That is fucking incredible. Also, if they are looking some endangered yellow-fuck frog they are looking to violate your property rights. “Your land is now an endangered wet land habitat and you can’t do anything with it anymore”

OMG, derpbook was a total shit-show yesterday. Here’s what I learned: that muslims in America are a “vulnerable population,” that we shouldn’t attribute this to radical islam because…something, that right-wing nutjobs think the shooter had a right to carry that scary “assault weapon” into a nightclub, that the Lt. Gov of Texas (he of they they got what was a coming to them tweet) is an asswipe.

Leftism never stops, it never sleeps, it never says “mission accomplished”, they will always seek more concessions, more control more power. Under any and all circumstances, by any means necessary, all of the time.

I just mean that it’s blatantly obvious their proposed policies don’t work at their stated aims. And even if what they really mean is “China-level total confiscation”, then we get to enjoy mass knife attacks which can still kill dozens.

Watching Reynolds’ character wheel his 1977 Pontiac Trans Am during wild chases took Watson back to a time when old-school muscle cars were powerful without a lot of added flash or technology.

“Back in the day, it was just a man and his car,” Watson said. “It had a big engine, it had tons of power and it was all fun. It wasn’t about the fancy body kits, the heated seats and the touch screens and all this other craziness. It was just a lot of power and a lot of fun.”

That night, as he lay awake in bed, a thought struck him, an idea for a marketing promotion that would end up turning a small dealership in southwestern Ohio into a destination for performance enthusiasts around the country.

The deal, announced in a Jan. 30 blog post, was simple: a base 2016 Mustang GT — fitted with a Roush Phase 2 supercharger that gives its 5.0-liter V-8 727 hp — for $39,995. Yes, including the car.

I remember an episode of Top Gear from a couple of years ago where they tested some aftermarket Mustang variations. They pointed out that the stock suspension, steering, and differential are shit, and the versions Top Gear liked best (and if I remember correctly did best on their track) had new suspensions, differentials, and modifications to the steering.

Many years ago I modified an ’86 Monte Carlo SS – minty Tennessee car – replacing the 180hp 305 with a 370hp 355. I also replace the transmission with an upgraded unit with a 2500 stall converter. It was a fast car for the time – 3400 pds with a strong engine.

The added hp made the SS a real beast to drive – as in a smatter of rain and it felt like the car wanted to spin out at anything above 35mph. Not enough tire. The stock suspension and brakes just couldn’t keep up with the new drivetrain. And the 7.5″ rear was always close to being grenaded.

It was a real lesson on how a vehicle – at best – is a whole package, not just an engine.

One of my uncles had a Monte Carlo of that vintage when they were new. I remember him talking with my dad about all the computer controls in the car. I think it might have been the first car of my uncle’s that he didn’t tune up himself.

Despite not liking many GM products, I do have a soft sport for those vintage Monte Carlos.

There was ONE year and ONE model in recent times that wasnt shit in exactly those three categories.

The 1999 Cobra had all wheel independent suspension, a 355 rear end with a 10.5″ SVO kevlar clutch, an all AL block and heads (which were huge due to being 4 port), and a very stiff steering. That car was balls for a 4.6 right from the factory.

p.s. I won a big bet on the suspension thing once. Dude was positive it was a solid rear axle…he made the bet, bent down to look and saw a large gas tank in his way. I laughed.

Indicative of the fact that Islamic societies didn’t have the moral wherewithal to not cull and mutilate their population of slaves once they’d outlived their usefulness, a fate that was specifically reserved for the African slave population. They also took many many more slaves out of Africa for many many years longer, just so there’s no mistaking the scale of the genocide.

There’s real frustration among Haitians over failures in progress promised to them, not just by the Clintons but from the international community at large. In 2015, Haitian activists protested outside the Clinton Foundation in New York, claiming the Clintons mismanaged hundreds of millions in taxpayer money through the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission.

But there is no evidence that Hillary Clinton, through the Clinton Foundation, raised “hundreds of millions of dollars” for a hospital that was never built. We consulted groups that have been critical of recovery delays in Haiti, but they could not point to a specific Clinton Foundation-funded hospital project, either.

“We’ve tried to figure out what he might be citing as well, but we can’t provide you with a source of his claim because one doesn’t exist,” said Craig Minassian, a Clinton Foundation spokesman. “The Clinton Foundation never committed to build a hospital, nor did it accept, raise, or spend funds for that purpose. His claim is false.”

Their proof that this story seem to rely on the fact that the Clinton Foundation does not seem to have promised or accomplished much of anything so there for they are not guilty of raising hundreds of millions for a hospital that was not built.

“Some bitch called me a bitch on Bitch Twitter and some darkie called me a racist on Black Twitter and some wetback called me a Mexiphobe on Undocumented Twitter and some little twink called me a self-hating self-tanner victim on Fag Twitter. I’m going to destroy them all!” Donald screamed.

“Isn’t all of Twitter just Fag Twitter?” the hat asked philosophically.

The hair laughed despite himself. “Stop it. Some of our country’s finest GOP politicians and their hairpieces have been homosexuals.”

“Out! I want both of you out!” He snatched the hat off the faucet and lumbered toward the bathroom door.

“Oh, god. He’s touching me with the finger that was in his ass,” the hat moaned.

“Donald, wait. It doesn’t have to go down like this, man,” the hair said.

Donald awkwardly opened the bathroom door with his ass play hand and threw the poopy hat into the hotel room filled with advisors waiting for him. His tiny, startled penis had forgotten they were there.

“Take this too,” he yelled at them, ripping the hairpiece away.

“Not the shit finger!” the hair gasped.

Donald slammed the door and retreated to his porcelain turd dungeon to Twitter forevermore.

I used to actively avoid reading SugarFree’s prose. Now I absorb it as readily as I can. I believe the intense mental and emotional scarring will blunt me to the lurking horrors of the world that I have yet to experience in the dark years to come.

I wonder if the ATF could spare a few agents from their cigarette smuggling investigations. Maybe Homeland Security Investigators could spend a little less time arresting gang members in the Bronx. I mean, the FBI is overwhelmed and they need the help from somewhere.

Gee I wonder. Maybe we should get out of the drug war business and the copyright enforcement business and such and worry about actual threats. That would be a start for sure.

Again, there is only so much LEOs can do. You guys think I am making some smart ass remark. I am pointing out reality. All of these promises to “put cops on the streets” and “connect the dots” are bullshit. It is not going to stop this or do much good. The only way to stop this is to keep radicals from being here in the first place. Once they are here, you likely are not going to stop them from doing real harm absent very good luck.

Again, there is only so much LEOs can do. You guys think I am making some smart ass remark. I am pointing out reality. All of these promises to “put cops on the streets” and “connect the dots” are bullshit. It is not going to stop this or do much good.

The article you posted seemed like it was lamenting the fact that the Constitution and those pesky rights was partially to blame for the shootings.

You apparently want to make this all about Muslim immigration, and hey, have yourself a good time with that, but I was responding to the article.

We have three choices Crusty, ignore these attacks and just let them happen as one of those things, effectively repeal the Constitution and put the screws to people, or take steps to limit the number of Muslims in our society. It is simple but brutal math. A certain non zero number of Muslims are going to engage in mass murder and there is no way to tell who they are or do much to stop them once they decide to do it. So the number of attacks is going to in large measure correlate to the number of Muslims in your society.

So really it is about Muslim immigration. If you don’t want to restrict it, fine. Just be honest and understand there is a price to be paid for that and no amount of “we will vet them and only let the good ones in” or “the FBI will protect us” bullshit is going to change that.

I am not telling you your answer is the wrong one. I am just saying everyone should be honest with themselves about what that means.

There is another choice. Don’t ignore the attacks, but accept that if you want anything like a free society, that sort of thing can happen.

I’m not interested in arguing about restricting immigration right now except to point out that this guy was a US citizen. Maybe restricting immigration helps a bit, but there are plenty of people already here that you can’t get rid of that way (assuming it is desirable to do so).

I wish they had pressed charges against him. He was apparently a piece of shit who beat the hell out of his wife. That, however, would not have prevented this. Gun control never stops determined criminals from getting guns and the prohibition against wife beaters buying guns would not have stopped this guy.

No question PC fears caused a lot of people to let this guy slide. That is a bad thing but I don’t think they would have stopped him even if they hadn’t been restricted by PC.

No, I really don’t make that assumption. If I did, it wouldn’t be a dilemma.

I know that if I beat up my wife, got myself on the radar of the local cops, and generally acted like an asshole, there’s a good chance that I would have a police record before long. Which would make it tough to buy firearms legally. I’m guessing he got a pass for being Muslim and by people who were just plain lazy.

The Navy Yard and Gabby Giffords shooters were similar – guys who should have had records but didn’t.

“Law enforcement is following hundreds of people and there are thousands of people that have come on their radar,” Shawn Henry, a former FBI executive assistant director, said in an interview. “The complexity of trying to navigate our laws and Constitution while trying to maintain optimal security is a really difficult challenge. You just cannot protect against everything.”

That effort is compounded in a country like the U.S., where free speech and the ability to buy guns are considered fundamental rights. “Just making statements isn’t enough to arrest somebody,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS News.

Stopping lone-wolf attacks in the U.S. is “extremely difficult” because law enforcement and intelligence officials are limited by laws in terms of how much internet surveillance they can do of suspects, as well as by the resources they have, King said.

“In many ways it’s searching for a needle in the haystack,” King said. “The FBI doesn’t have the personnel to keep tabs on everybody.”

There is no way to tell who is actually going to do something and who won’t. So the price of having Muslims in our society is that every few months a few dozen people or more are butchered in furtherance of the jihad.

That is just how it is. You either kill off the constitution and start rounding people up on suspicion but not for actually doing anything or you have a steady stream of incidents like we had this weekend.

I am not saying your choice to accept the terrorism is a bad one. I am just saying that is the choice you are making. And the more Muslims you have in your society, the higher the price of that choice is.

Or you could just stop subsidizing the migration from war torn middle eastern countries and let the free market fix it. Of course that would also mean you probably should stop bombing the shit out of them and killing their leaders.

His parents came from Afghanistan and that certainly was being bombed. It would take a long time to solve this problem the correct way and that means not trampling the right not to be spied on by your government. If the US respected property rights and wasn’t so goddamned busy shuffling other people’s money around, a sustainable equilibrium would eventually emerge. Take the guns! More Agent Smiths! No thanks.

If he had shot up a recruiting station, then you could say the bombing had something to do with it. But that is not what he did. He shot up a gay bar because he hated guys and couldn’t stand the fact that they lived openly in this country. Our bombing of Afghanistan had nothing to do with any of that. This guy’s parents came here in 1986. Had 911 never happened and we never bombed Afghanistan, he still would have hated gays and felt it was his religious duty to murder them. This was about his religion and gays not about bombing.

I’m not saying it wasn’t about his religion. I’m saying take what you want and pay for it. In a society absent of state coercion, you’d be able to form communities that would be much better at handling nutcases like this than some shiny, imperial city a thousand miles away. Don’t pay for them to come to the US, but if they have the means and the community decides to accept them, then I can’t object. As for the bombing, he probably would’ve killed gays in Lahore if the US hadn’t gotten involved in the first place. Tragic, but that certainly wouldn’t be my problem.

In a society absent of state coercion, you’d be able to form communities that would be much better at handling nutcases like this

That is just naive to think that. If I am a typical Muslim living in the US, what reason to I have to confront the radicals? They are not going to target me as a fellow Muslim, at least not yet, and confronting them is dangerous. If I am a Muslim and I go pick a fight with some radical Imam and tell him that Islam doesn’t condone murdering gays or beating your wife, I am liable to get myself killed. So why would I do that? The rational thing to do is just shut up and stay out of it.

Why does it have to be the typical Muslim confronting the radicals? Be a badass society where if you come in and start threatening people, you’re shown the door with extreme prejudice. If it does come to war after that, well, you’ve done the right thing and you’ve still maintained your principles. Or you could sell them out and get into war anyways. If Muslims are incorrigible, then we’re arguing a moot point because war then is inevitable. I’ll go this far: Deport or lock up any Imam advocating violence.

Because it is their community. What, do you think Muslims are going to listen to you or me tell them what their religion actually means? The only people who can make Islam less radical are Muslims.

And you are the one talking about how communities could solve this if only the government would allow it. Well who the hell is the “community” if not other Muslims? Again, I don’t think this guy or any other Muslim is going to be too interested in being lectured by some well meaning non Muslim about what their religion really means.

John, I’ve just spent the last day and half arguing with idiots on FB that indeed Islam is extremely oppressive of gays. The opinion that gays are immoral isn’t held by a few, but by majorities in every country across the Islamic world. We’re arguing strategy not about whether or not I could change what a Muslim thinks. I’m not willing to give up my right or anyone’s who hasn’t committed or is under suspicion of committing a crime. I watched what you were arguing with CJ above and was trying to find a common ground. Immigration patterns have been so screwed with by the government that it’s almost impossible to see what our demographics would look like if the market had handled them. It’s a Gordian knot now.

Immigration patterns have been so screwed with by the government that it’s almost impossible to see what our demographics would look like if the market had handled them.

I would think the domestic population would have a higher birthrate and would be decidedly more European in their ancestry. Something tells me that a third worlder with no valuable skills would have a difficult time moving across the world to an alien culture with an advanced economy and a high cost of living without the aid of free healthcare, free education, housing subsidies, cash handouts and food stamps to support their 9 children.

Immigration as we have it with a welfare state, is just another government program that aims to knock whites down a few pegs.

We should both stop bombing the crap out of them, and keep them from coming here at the same time.

Let these primitive animals stay over there and keep on killing each other in their own disgusting shitholes until they decide they’re tired of it. If we’re really lucky, maybe in about 100 years or so they’ll finally be ready to join civilized humanity, though I have my doubts even that will be enough time.

Would likely not help. It would help some in that it would turn nightclubs into harder targets. But, having to be armed and on guard every time you go out into public is not a very free society. And once people were armed, the jijadists would just change their tactics and start using bombs or other means that that being armed would not help you stop.

Your idea is a good one for a lot of reasons but it isn’t going to help much with this.

I didn’t say you did. But, you would probably want to be. And if you were not, then what good does it do? I get the idea that the threat of someone being armed and shooting back would have made this attack a lot harder and likely a lot less deadly. I am just saying that it would only mean that these guys change their tactics not that they stop murdering people.

Yes. I have no doubt he would have met a few he didn’t want to meet had he tried this at a hip hop bar. But that makes my point. These guys are always going to seek out the soft target. So hardening targets, while not a bad thing, doesn’t solve the problem since you can’t harden them all.

A few years ago, I read about how the South African government thought it was unfair that some people could afford to protect their property and others couldn’t, meaning that crime would be unfairly distributed in society, with the poor getting hit more.

The fact is that it’s just not that difficult to murder a bunch of people. The hardest part is overcoming a person’s natural reluctance to murder a bunch of people that they don’t know. Once you’re past that, the means they use to do it are almost an afterthought.

My friends and I used to play a game over drinks where you’d have to come up with an idea to kill as many people as possible with the objects the other guys gave you. For example, you get a bag of candy corn, a broken bicycle pump and 10 sparklers.

No Warty it is not. Give everyone an AR 15 and the guy would just have rammed a car full of explosives into the place and killed just as many people. A well armed populace won’t solve the problem of people who not only want to kill but are willing to die in the process.

Give everyone an AR 15 and the guy would just have rammed a car full of explosives into the place and killed just as many people.

Thankfully, they’re still really bad at the whole bomb making thing, both in the States and abroad. And of course, this guy didn’t manage to get his device(s) to detonate, assuming he even had any to begin with.

Dunno why, as their compatriots in ISIS have no problem with constructing effective, gigantic VBIEDs and getting brainwashed idiots to drive them at opposing forces. Count our blessings, I guess.

The Tsarnaevs could have killed a lot more people than they managed if they knew how to make even the most basic of high explosives. Still managed to do a hideously effective job, of course.

And we can’t depend on their incompetence to last forever. Bomb building while not easy is not that hard either. Give them time and they will eventually figure it out, especially with the internet and the ease of communication.

Otherwise stated: Having the ability to be armed everytime you leave the house is a prerequisite to a free society, while needing to be armed because things are that out of control is probably an indicator that it’s a broken society.

Sure RC. But the point of that is so that you don’t have to be on guard all the time. The point of being armed and having the right to self defense is so that you can live in peace not so that you get to shoot people. You miss the point.

Energy industry lawyers, however, dismiss comparisons to tobacco litigation, seeing a futile attempt by environmentalists to upend decades of case law. Courts have traditionally ruled that to hold defendants liable, their actions or products must be directly linked to damages caused to plaintiffs, said Kevin Ewing, an attorney with the Houston law firm Bracewell.

“Tobacco was shown to cause specific harm to specific individuals,” he said. “Not so with climate change, where we cannot yet discern the factual connection between a company’s conduct and individual harm, even though we can observe the global effects of climate change at large.”

Environmental lawyers have argued for years that governments and companies are obligated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the interests of protecting mankind from rising oceans, severe storms and the other effects of climate change. They had little success. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2011 that the federal government alone has the power to control carbon emissions, which are legal are under air pollution laws all over the world.

It is nothing but magical thinking. Notice no one ever explains what the FBI could have done differently that would have stopped this guy. The bottom line is Clinton doesn’t want to talk about the problem or face any of the realistic solutions. So, she is peddling an imaginary solution that sounds good but is in fact completely worthless.

In 2016, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Washington DC underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The H-Team.

So we’re already gearing up for the “terrorism debate” post-Orlando, given suspect Omar Mateen’s alleged pledge of support for ISIS. You can hear it everywhere, from conservative reporters to Sunday talk shows to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.

This whole state of affairs is absurd. The truth is that, in both the terrorism and guns debate, we’re asking the same question: What can be done to make this less likely to happen again? Part of the answer is, in both cases, “make it harder to get guns.”

We don’t have two separate problems, a gun problem and a terrorism problem. We have a terrorism problem that feeds on our gun problem. And the more we treat terrorism as something totally separate from, and scarier than, our gun problem, the more we help terrorists seem stronger than they are ? which is exactly what they want.

Even IF IF IF trading our freedom in gave us more security, I’d generally prefer more freedom anyway.

I’m not convinced a world with less freedom and no 9/11 would be a better world.

Meanwhile, there’s this thing called cowardice. Among other things, it means that one is willing to sell his principles short because he’s scared.

I’m not sure how reasonable it is for the average person to be afraid of being the subject of a terrorist attack, but even is someone is afraid, that doesn’t necessarily mean they need to sell their principles short.

Freedom of religion is a pretty awesome principle–it’s an integral part of why America is awesome. It’s gonna take a lot more than this shooting in Miami before I’m willing to sell freedom of religion short. And I feel the same way about the Second Amendment, too.

Also: so I’m glad the NSA was able to detect and stop this incident before it could happen /snark. Which reminds me of Snowden when he said – to paraphrase – when you try to capture everything to only end up capturing nothing.

I suspect that if she had reported him he’d have either lost his job, or had his gun permit yanked (which would effectively end his job), which would have angered him further. You see this a lot with cops, who IIRC, are prone to domestic violence but rarely get reported.

All Arabs aren’t Muslin. A lot of Muslims don’t practice their faith like many other religions. Devout Muslims believe in Sharia law and some sects want to return to a 17th century interpretation of the Koran. Without getting into the merits or shortcomings of any religion; Sharia law and Wahabism is simple not compatible with western culture. Wahabism is the dominant sect in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Both those countries along with Turkey sponser most of the world’s terroism. Lots of questions with one simple answer. The Mosque that spew this hate should be closed and the clerics should be sent back to Saudi Arabia. All diplomatic ties to the 3 countries above should be ended. Any American caught dealing with them in any manner should have their citizenship revoked and all properties and monies confiscated and given to the families of terro victims. Why won’t this work, because our Federal government is completely bought and paid for by the Saudi government and won’t do anything that might offend them. May the Orlando victims rest in place while the true criminals go along their merry way

Consider this. Afghanistan was while a backward country, a fairly moderate Muslim country. Kabul was a pretty progressive place in the 1970s. The Afghans fought a ten year war against the Soviets that every Muslim religious authority in the world agreed was a proper jihad and not once did the Afghans engage in suicide bombing.

After the Soviets left Bin Ladin and the fucking Saudis showed up with their money and bought off all of the Mosques and replaced the Imams with people who preached their brand of barbarism. And look how Afghanistan is now.

Yeah, the Saudis are the problem. There are places all over the world, Chechnya, Malaysia, Afghanistan just to name three where Muslims managed to live for hundreds of years without being murderous barbaric animals but now increasingly are just that thanks the Saudis showing up and funding schools and Mosques. Saudi Arabia is a boil on the ass of civilization.

Erdogan is a retrograde sack of shit, but I’m not aware of him sponsoring terrorism, unless you’re counting their long war against the Kurds.

And for what it’s worth, all the Turks I know are Muslim in the same way that most Americans are Protestant – in name only. They might go to the mosque once a year to make their grandmas happy, and that’s about it.

The Turks you know are likely either young or still remember the echoes of the founding of the Republic. That’s the same group I have most of my acquaintances from. They had Erdogan pegged, big time. They saw this coming from the time he was mayor of Istanbul.

The under-30s and the over-60s are almost all pretty live-and-let-live and never go to mosque and generally are cool with nearly everyone around them – Iranians, Syrians, Greeks, Iraqis…everyone except Kurds, but even then they tend not to wish them any specific harm.

Now, I have a Lebanese friend who’s been in the States since shortly after the Bosnian War (Lebanon sent several groups to fight there) who insists that the Turks are barely any better than the Arab Sunnis – who are the absolute scum of the earth – mostly due to the Armenian genocide and tacit alliance with the Saudis. Evidently, there are tons of familial ties between Lebanon and Armenia, most of which had to do with Lebanon being a chief refuge of the expelled and escaped Armenians.

In my observation, there seems to be a deepening generational rift, which is pretty strange, given how almost universally-revered is the secularism of Mustafa Kemal even now. People under 30 and over, say, 60 seem to lean very much toward more liberalism than the original principles of the Cumhurriyet, while those in the middle, and especially non-Kurds in the south and east appear to be trending toward an Arabist Sunni Islamism – which is pretty unusual for the region historically AFAIK.

‘Course tarran probably will correct the shit out of me, since I’m going mostly on selection-bias tinged interactions with the youngins and those closest to the military.

“Without getting into the merits or shortcomings of any religion; Sharia law and Wahabism is simple not compatible with western culture.”

We need to keep in mind that Sharia represents the rule of law to many of these people–and the governments they want to replace with Sharia are/were horrifically corrupt governments run by the whims of dictators rather than the rule of law.

Across North Africa and into Central Africa through the Middle East and into Central Asia, we’re talking about regions that have been dominated for more than a hundred years, first by unaccountable colonial administrations and then by corrupt dictatorships.

To such people, Sharia represents a law that isn’t subject to the whims of corrupt governments and dictators. It’s sort of what the framers meant when they were talking about “god given rights”. They didn’t necessarily mean that God actually gave us these political rights–they knew all about the Magna Carta, Peace of Westphalia, etc. and where those rights came from. By “god given rights”, they simply meant that our rights were not granted by government and couldn’t be taken away by government either (although the government could violate them).

If you lived in a society with unaccountable government, you might like the idea of the rule of law coming from God, too. One that everyone already agrees is legitimate and isn’t subject to the whims of dictators. That is what many Muslims across the Muslims world mean when they talk about Sharia. Yeah, the punishments and logic are medieval, but everyone knows what they are, believes in their legitimacy, and they represent what we mean when we say “rule of law”.

Sure Ken. But the ones who live in the west want it implemented there too. It is not just some “well its the only alternative” position of a few people living in autocratic countries. Sorry, it is a bit more complex and problematic than that.

If you lived in a society with unaccountable government, you might like the idea of the rule of law coming from God, too. One that everyone already agrees is legitimate and isn’t subject to the whims of dictators

What the hell are you talking about? They’ve had sharia since the beginning. It’s not a response to dictatorial whims. It is the will of Allah, as expressed through the Prophet.

Sharia is intended to make them live lives closest to the way Allah commands.